I Love Love. All of It.
On being queer, believing deeply in ritual, and why ceremony belongs to every kind of love.
7/30/20264 min read
A potentially unsurprising confession from a marriage celebrant: I really, really love love.
Not only the shiny, newly-engaged, champagne popping kind, although I am absolutely here for that. I love the love that has weathered things. The love that arrived unexpectedly. The love that took the long way around. The love that is loud and joyful, and the love that is quiet, steady and deeply known.
I love queer love. Straight love. Young love. Later-in-life love. Second-chance love. Love shaped by blended families, chosen families and communities that have held people through every version of themselves.
I love love in all the ways it finds us. And all the ways we choose to keep showing up for it.
I’m queer. I’m a lesbian. And that shapes how I hold ceremony.
My queerness isn’t separate from the way I understand love, commitment or belonging. It is part of the lens I bring to this work.
Queer people know something about creating meaning for ourselves. We know about questioning the scripts we’ve inherited, keeping what feels true and joyfully tossing out what doesn’t. We know that family can be given, chosen, created and gathered around us. We know the significance of being witnessed as exactly who we are and of having the people we love say: Yes. We see you. We honour this. We are with you.
For a long time, marriage wasn’t a ritual that welcomed every kind of love. For queer people, the right to marry in Australia is still relatively new. That history gives the act of gathering, witnessing and publicly naming our commitments a particular kind of weight.
But it also gives us permission to imagine ceremony differently.
There is no single correct way to marry. No compulsory template. No need to shrink your relationship into language, traditions or roles that don’t belong to you.
Your ceremony should sound like you.
Why ritual still matters
Marriage is a legal act, but it can also be so much more than paperwork and signatures.
A ceremony marks a threshold. It asks us to pause in the middle of busy lives and properly notice what is happening: two people are choosing one another, and the people who matter most have gathered to witness it.
That witnessing matters.
There is something powerful about saying words aloud that you may have felt for years. About speaking promises in front of the people who will cheer for you, hold you accountable, make room at the table and remind you of those promises when life inevitably gets a little less champagne tower and a little more “who was supposed to buy milk?”
Ritual gives shape to the things we feel but don’t always have language for. It says: This matters. This love matters. This moment deserves our full attention.
And I believe that kind of meaning belongs to everyone.
Ceremony is for all of us
Ceremony is not reserved for one kind of couple, one kind of family or one particular version of a wedding.
It belongs to the couple planning a huge, joyful celebration with everyone they have ever loved in one room. It belongs to the couple standing barefoot beside the ocean with six guests and a very excited dog. It belongs to people who have waited decades for this moment, people marrying again with new wisdom and people building families that don’t fit neatly into traditional boxes.
It belongs to queer couples who want to honour the road that brought them here. To couples who want to weave culture, spirituality or family traditions into the day. To those creating entirely new rituals because the old ones were never made with them in mind.
You don’t have to perform a version of marriage that doesn’t feel like yours.
You get to decide what commitment means in your relationship. You get to choose the promises you make, the traditions you carry forward and the ones you leave behind. You get to decide who stands beside you, who speaks, who participates and how your people gather around your love.
My role is to listen closely enough to understand what matters and then help you create a ceremony that feels true.
This is what Gathered means to me
Gathered is about more than bringing people into the same physical space.
It is about gathering the stories that made you. Gathering the people who know and love you. Gathering the traditions, memories, identities and tiny shared moments that have shaped your relationship.
Then, together, we make something meaningful from them.
Something warm. Something honest. Something with soul.
Because I don’t believe the most beautiful ceremonies are the ones that follow every rule or say all the “right” things. They are the ones where everyone in the room can feel the truth of the relationship in front of them.
The ones that make you laugh in a way that could only belong to the two of you. The ones that make your favourite people reach for each other’s hands. The ones where you look around and realise: These are our people. This is our love. This is the life we are choosing.
That is what I love about marriage.
Not a perfect performance. Not tradition for tradition’s sake. But the courage and tenderness of choosing someone, naming that choice and inviting your people to witness it.
Love, in every form, is worthy of ceremony.
And I would be so honoured to gather around yours.